Evelyn Iritani with Mark Obmascik Live at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove

Evelyn Iritani is joining us to share about her new historical book on the behind-the-scenes American–Japanese contacts in World War II called: Safe Passages, The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians During World War II on Monday, May 18th at 6:00 PM at our Aspen Grove location.

This event is in partnership with the Japanese American Resource Center of Colorado!

Registration includes the following options:

• A signed Hardcover copy of the book … OR

• A $5 Gift Card to Tattered Cover Book Store

This event includes an opportunity to meet the author, participate in an audience Q&A after the book talk, and get your book(s) signed and personalized. Photos with the author are welcome!

We will have a limited supply of additional books for guests to purchase in store. Only a book ticket guarantees you a copy of the book.

If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 7 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup—the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.

In Safe Passage, the award-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and repatriated Japanese citizens of Latin America, sometimes against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The result is a revelatory account of the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Evelyn Iritani is the author of An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories from the Life of an American Town. She is a former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times, where her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series she coauthored on Wal-Mart.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Mark Obmascik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Big Year, which was made into a movie, and Halfway to Heaven. He won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for outdoor literature, the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism, and was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Denver with his wife and their three sons.

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